


this city will eat you alive

by gaytimetraveller



Category: Promare (2019)
Genre: Alternate Universe, Gen, kinda. sorta., so this is essentially a promare twewy au
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-03-17
Updated: 2020-03-19
Packaged: 2021-02-28 18:47:43
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 6,484
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23181970
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/gaytimetraveller/pseuds/gaytimetraveller
Summary: Lio Fotia had died, somewhat horribly, at sixteen years old, and had spent every year since as an underpaid and overqualified grim reaper without much of any other option. He was also a dance teacher, had two layabout roommates, and a grudge against his boss.On the other hand, Galo Thymos had died about a week ago, didn't remember a thing about it, and was possibly about to make some really bad decisions.
Relationships: Lio Fotia & Galo Thymos, Lio Fotia & Gueira & Meis
Comments: 9
Kudos: 35





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> hi and welcome to my kinda sorta promare twewy au? as in. yeah it's kiiiiiinda twewy but im also here to take some liberties and im not really here to follow the plot at all
> 
> all i can explain this one as is *vague gesturing* twewy and promare. they've both got physics. It Works. stay tuned for galo's side of this in chapter 2?

Despite everything, Lio generally liked his daily life.

He liked his day job; it was enough to pay the bills, and he had just enough control over his schedule for it to work out. The sporadic scheduling he had to put up with at his other job had made several previous part-time gigs fall through on him, and that one didn’t even pay  _ that  _ well. So while, sure, it wasn’t exactly anyone’s dream to work evenings at a neighbourhood dance studio, he liked it enough. He was satisfied. It absolutely beat his last attempt at working at the corner store.

In another life, Lio might’ve aimed higher, might’ve chased the law or science or humanities degrees he’d once planned for. Or he might’ve been happy enough with the humdrum (but well paying) work he’d done back when he’d spent a few months as a mechanic. Even with just being a part-time dance teacher, who had just enough to pay his portion of the bills and could coast along in life until something bigger and better came along.

But in this one, none of it would ever really be…fulfilling, exactly. Living a normal, modern Promepolitan life would always be incomplete, for Lio, and it would never really be what he wanted anyways.

As it stood, he was happy enough to be walking home on a warm evening, in the kind of mild spring weather that preceded the blazing dry heat and occasional humidity of a Promepolis summer. It’d been a long day, or at least felt like one, but his shift at the studio had been pleasant enough. On the other hand, the hours he’d had to clock in at his other job had been mind-numbingly boring, with the six-ish hours he’d spend on shift stretching out ever-so-slowly like pulling pieces of taffy. At least it hadn’t been longer. It could’ve been longer. (It’d been longer before, because his boss was an asshole who loved to waste his time, and had had him sitting on his ass for ten whole under or unpaid hours before.)

But hey! A long day also meant he could rationalize not only stopping for a smoothie, but going for the pricier  _ seven _ dollar large smoothie on his way home.

So with a large-sized raspberry smoothie in hand, Lio practically skipped the rest of the way home, even humming a vague little tune as he went. A good mood, and a bit of extra pocket change, always made the trip home a little bit brighter. Even when the nighttime chill started to set in, and others pulled their jackets around them, Lio stayed warm and buzzing, a frequency trilling from his chest out to his fingertips.

See, despite all appearances, Lio was someone whose moods tended to be impactful in a certain way. Not quite infectious, but palpable. Most people would’ve attributed it to the fact that he stuck out like a sore thumb, especially if there was no crowd to blend into. With the nearly neon hair, the way he dressed, and the kind of presence he had; it was kinda unavoidable that heads turned. It was somehow hard  _ not _ to notice him, and not to pick up on how, even at his most restrained and unreadable, he tended to shift a room just by showing up.

Lio would attribute it near entirely to the fact that literal energy-affecting creatures loved to cling to him, as if he were the pied piper of little supernatural annoyances. But they didn’t affect  _ him _ , they just loved to follow him around and then flock to everyone else and bother them if he left them alone to do it. Invisible to the regular human eye, but all too visible in their mischief for him.

Even now, there was one trailing after him, winding between his legs and nipping at his ankles if he stood still for too long. This one was a small green-ish fox, with pointed ears and sharp teeth and a tail like a plume of flame. It’d been following him since he’d made the mistake of petting it during his shift several hours ago, and he didn’t quite have the heart to dispel it.

Although they tended to be a bit of trouble, Lio liked the little creatures. Or, at least, he’d gotten used to them. So despite their annoyances, like how that little fox would occasionally tangle itself and trip him up, he liked them. That affinity made him good at his job too.

(An added bonus was that his boss  _ hated _ how the things followed him around like ducklings waddling after a mother duck. Lio knew well enough that if he’d found out about the one with him now, or about the small crowd of them that’d flocked to him during his shift, he’d be in big trouble. Again. But his boss was an asshole, who only hated them because of Lio’s affinity for them, so the tiny rebellions were satisfying.)

By the time he got back to his building, the sun was well set and the fox at his feet had been joined by a sharp-clawed bat perched on his shoulder. He tossed the smoothie cup into the recycling by the stairs, and wished for the thirtieth time that week that the elevator was working. It was quite stupid, in his opinion, that actual supernatural harriers of the dead, or whatever else you wanted to call them, got to have wings but couldn’t actually fly anywhere with them. Being a Reaper may as well have been a scam.

When he got up to their third floor door, Gueira was already standing in front of it, takeout boxes piled up in one arm and the other hand desperately trying to wrangle the deadbolt into opening. Lio swooped in, wrenching the keys and opening the door with one hand, then ducking in before Gueira could, all in one smooth motion while the other fumbled with the takeout. He even plucked one of the boxes out of his hands once he’d slipped his shoes off, leaving Gueira to stare after him as he took the admittedly short walk into the kitchen.

The little bat on his shoulder chittered excitedly as he pried open the box. Meis’ head popped up over the back of the couch, rolling his one visible eye as he stared between Lio and Gueira.

“Are those the good noodles? And strays again? Really, Boss?” Meis frowned, watching Gueira set down the rest of the boxes on the counter.

Lio shrugged, popping an egg roll in his mouth while Gueira grumbled something about their budget.

“S’not noodles! I got us egg rolls, and fried rice, and that stupid fizzy water Lio likes, cause you said you didn’t want noodles if they weren’t the good noodles.”

Meis lazily got up to make his way to the kitchen, and Lio felt just a little guilty about the smoothie. Supper from the good (and more expensive) ramen shop would’ve been good, and Gueira had even bothered to get him a sparkling water, but then again, he had no complaints about egg rolls. It’d been worth it, maybe. It was a good smoothie. He flicked one shoulder and the bat peering at his supper took off, racing to perch right on Meis’ head.

Gueira laughed when Meis made a face and squawked, but Lio managed to keep his expression placid as he cracked open his drink.

“Foresight’s gonna kill you,  _ again _ , if he finds out you’re letting strays hang around again,”

Lio flicked a hand and the bat sitting on his head disappeared in a haze of static. The fox remained, now pacing along the back of the couch. Meis stared at him, deadpan.

“Like I said, he’ll kill you.”

“Who said he needs to know? It’s not like he’s ever going to promote me anyways, and I think he’d rather have me on the hook as his lackey forever instead of killing me.” Lio took a gulp of his drink, and Gueira screwed up his face, disgusted as ever by anything plain and fizzy.

Meis scoffed. “True enough. He promoted the rest of the good ones, so now you’re the last decent Reaper he can threaten that gives a shit.”

Then they managed a few minutes of quietly eating, until Gueira’s phone buzzed, and everyone else, being nosy, turned to look.

Gueira got a bit of a sheepish look as he laid down the rice he’d been shovelling into his mouth to look at the screen, and glanced up at the others before putting it back in his pocket. “Hey Boss? I, uh, ran into Aina down at the Chinese food place? Just now?”

The other two stared, and when Lio narrowed his eyes at him, the fox jumped off the couch to coil around Gueira’s feet in a vaguely threatening way.

“So? What happened?”

“Well, uh, here’s the thing,” Gueira paused his wheedling to make a face. “Don’t get mad at me but, Aina’s really upset, cause Foresight hired at least one of today’s winners.”

Oh.

Oh no.

Lio froze, and then promptly slammed his head onto the counter to simultaneous shrieks of “Boss!”

He didn’t even have to  _ guess _ which one it was. He thought about his horribly monotonous afternoon sitting at the cafe downtown, and about the big blue-haired idiot who’d actually managed to catch sight of him despite the fact that he was tuned to blend in, and about the start of the week when Aina had been freaking out because one of her friends had died and she hadn’t known until he’d been put in the Game, and how some of them kind of thought Foresight had done it on purpose. Lio knew of him well enough, had met him through Aina; he was a big-headed big-mouthed idiot who, was maybe a little good looking, and for some ungodly reason, also knew Kray Foresight and held him up on some kind of pedestal. As if Kray Foresight’s normal life was any more admirable than his contemptible supernatural one. Lio had done his homework on that too, rest assured.

Did the vague notion of god Lio figured probably existed hate him, specifically? Were they just trying to piss him off? Trying to make him miserable? As if his stupid shitty job situation wasn’t bad enough?

He clamped both hands over his ears and leaned his forehead further into the cold counter as Meis and Gueira started bickering over something, and thought about how he was so,  _ so _ fucking tired of Foresight, and tired of work, and tired of being stuck at his stupid fucking minimum rank position as an underpaid and overqualified grim reaper just because his stupid boss hated his stupid guts for reasons he could only guess. He gritted his teeth, the sound like nails on a chalkboard as sickly furious heat bubbled in his throat.

The air in the kitchen hissed with static, and there was a yelp he guessed came from Gueira as one of them knocked over their chair, while he felt Meis slide their drinks off of the counter. The fox yelped too, skittering off somewhere. He didn’t have to look up to know phantom sparks were staticking across the counter, hissing and popping in little starbursts and stinging something like a static shock when they actually collided with anything. That is, except Lio.

He was kind of tired of this too. He really got to be downtown Promepolis’ most abnormal Reaper, with nothing to show for it but years of denied promotions and talents that seemed to cause nothing but trouble.

While the other two squeaked, trying to get the takeout out of the way, just in case (Lio’s flames  _ had _ somehow jumped frequencies before, enough to interact with the physical at least) Lio let the fire crackle and bubble for another few moments. Before the temperature in the apartment could really start going up or, god forbid, the fire alarm could end up going off, which is to say when his fingers started to go numb, burning white hot in will-o-wisps that were on the verge of being a little too tangible as the white noise started to roar, Lio sighed heavily and tried to take in a slow breath.

It was always a bad idea to try to smother the flames, for him or any other Reaper with that particular ability. But always more-so for him. It always went about as well as pouring water on a grease fire.

The safer alternative was to temper them, to shift frequency until they began to smoulder. Or, as Lio liked to see it, to simply draw them back into himself, back into whatever bright source they came from so that they could go back to hissing under his skin like a frequency, instead of in a two-to-three foot radius of him in his apartment’s kitchen.

Once the neon static subsided, Lio picked himself back up with a certain weariness, rubbing at his temples once he was upright. Gueira whistled, Lio’s box of egg rolls in hand.

“I don’t think I’ve seen you that bad in a while Boss, everything alright?”

He nodded, silent for a few moments while Meis and Gueira hesitated to sit back down. “Yeah, it’s just,” he scrunched his face up, a little too close to tears for comfort, “I just  _ know _ I’m gonna get stuck with the new guy, and he’s going to be a huge pain in the ass, and then Foresight is going to promote him up, because he’s an asshole. And I’m going to be stuck here. We’re all just going to be…here. In this apartment, barely making rent.”

Neither of them said anything, because it wasn’t like he was wrong. Gueira and Meis weren’t exactly the most ambitious amongst the local Reapers, even if Lio thought they had the potential to do better things and move up in the ranks. (Even if Lio thought he may as well have been the weight holding them down, now.)

And it wasn’t exactly like it was any big secret that Lio was the best Reaper among their harriers; the state of his wings could attest to that. Not to mention how their boss loved to treat him as an underpaid right hand man, constantly leaving him with work usually reserved for a Game Master, but combined with less pay, the worst hours, and keeping up with standards for his own position. While still having to pay his bills, while still having to take up other work. Even if he liked it, no amount of good shifts at the studio could make up for piles of unpaid Reaper overtime, or unpaid wastes of his time. Ones he had to do if he didn’t want to end up dead, for good this time.

It was painfully transparent to anyone actually paying attention that Lio should’ve been higher up, or at least more well paid, long ago. He’d stuck around for years, stuck at the bottom, not kept there by his own design unlike certain layabouts. He had aspirations, and the talent to pull it off. Anyone who was high up enough or had been around long enough knew he couldn’t leave either. Sure, there were other districts in Promepolis, other Games with their own staff, but they were mostly outskirts. Theirs was the biggest, the most powerful by default through virtue of size and location, right in the heart of the city. So, unless Lio somehow managed to negotiate a move to another city entirely (unlikely, purely unlikely) and was willing to actually go, all that really awaited him was either a transfer that would do nothing but put him further down the food chain, or erasure.

(Once, Foresight had even made the almost cruel offer to petition their Composer for him to be brought back to life in full, if his position as a Reaper was truly that bad.

Out of everyone in their Underground, Foresight knew his entry fee, he knew Lio had never been able to have a normal life. He knew exactly how callous such an offer was. It would drive him insane, to be alive again, to still have the sight. It almost had before.)

After a few more moments in silence, Lio kicked out of his chair and crossed his arms, purposely not looking at the window where several neighbourhood bird-like Noise were congregated and watching him, or at the couch where the fox was still curled up.

“We’ll do as we always do,” Lio huffed. “I’ll stand my ground, and…”

“We’ll do nothing?” Meis suggested, sliding back into his seat. Gueira snorted.

“That’s what we do best, yeah?”

Lio leaned back, stared at the ceiling, and started to shake his head. “No. If…if no one does anything about the state of this city soon enough, I’m done.”

The other two looked at each other, then back at Lio. Gueira raised both eyebrows at him. “All over one rookie? Maybe he’s not that bad Boss! It’ll be fine,”

“We always make ends meet,” Meis chipped in. “I don’t think anyone wants you getting hurt, or transferring out.”

“No, no this isn’t one rookie, but…” he stared at the floor this time, mouth moving a few times before he actually spoke. “No one likes how things are going here, not anymore. Foresight is Conducting this city straight into the ground. Half of the Reapers are fed up with him, and the Composer never does anything about it, if we even have one at this point. Even in his life among the living, he does nothing but harm. If no one does anything, all we’ll do is stagnate while Foresight makes grabs for more power, and another incompetent rookie is just another drop in the sea.”

Lio spun on one heel, facing away from the other two, shoulders squared and back straight. Even under their yellowed cheap apartment lights, his wings glinted like sharp and vicious metal, like sleek and deadly shadows, a betrayal of exactly how much skill he had. Exactly what was being wasted.

“If nothing changes, I’ll challenge him for his position.”

Hazy flames flickered over his hands, casting a ghostly light around him as they flitted between noise-ridden shapes, like will-o’-wisps running along his skin. Like this, they had intent, meant to be wielded like a well-honed weapon, not just some bizarre frequency side effect. Lio breathed out, and they lit a small radius, like a lazy orbit of white noise and flame.

“I swear, I’ll kill him.”


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> WELL here we go! is this probably under-edited? sure but if i kept going with that i'd never finish it so!
> 
> this is the part where i start taking Real Liberties, altho i feel like what's up with galo is in fact, incredibly obvious, to anyone familiar with twewy worldbuilding? i feel kinda bad for throwing that one out there right off the bat but also who knows when ill get around to writing more for this one
> 
> (probably soon tho. because current events)

Exactly one week ago, Galo Thymos had died. Surprisingly, it hadn’t been in a blaze of glory on the job, or something comedic enough to tell stories about. In fact, he didn’t even remember what had happened, which was honestly not as big of a problem as it probably should’ve been.

And now, it was technically Galo’s first day on his new job, and boy howdy! He was starting to regret it. Just a little.

See, Galo Thymos had always been the type of person who liked to help people. From when he was eight years old and climbing a tree to get his neighbour’s cat down (yes, really) to when he managed to become a real firefighter.

It’d been that helpfulness that’d gotten his arm burnt halfway to a crisp nearly a year ago, and now, it’d gotten him killed too.

But hey! It wasn’t  _ that _ bad. After all, Galo was also (un)lucky enough to grab a spot in the local Reaper’s Game. In Galo’s opinion, the Game had been a breeze! Really, running halfway across Promepolis while piggy-backing his game partner for half the week was nothing for a guy who had been doing laps around the block every morning since he was sixteen or seventeen. He’d even been on his high school track team!

Even taking out Noise wasn’t that hard, and most of the Reapers didn’t give him a whole lot of trouble. The ones who decided to start handing out riddles might’ve been a problem if his game partner hadn’t been an actual university student scientist intern genius or something. She was quick-thinking too, even if she wasn’t quite as quick on her feet. Between the two of them, it hadn’t seemed hard to get to the final day at all!

At first it’d seemed obvious to Galo that he wanted to return to his own life when it was all over, to go back to an everyday existence. But, thinking about it throughout the week, something about that was…off. Something between a feeling in his gut and a whisper in his ear was telling him that that was the wrong choice, and that next time, there wouldn’t be a second chance.

Hm.

Galo’s instincts didn’t lead him wrong, most of the time.

(There was something else weird too, but he didn’t have the time to think about it while he was in the Game.)

So when they made it past their final challenge, and suddenly Kray was there, and everything Galo was being told was going past him a mile a minute, he didn’t even  _ think _ before choosing the other option. He didn’t even get the chance to see how his game partner reacted to that, didn’t get to see what she chose before the Gov was smiling at him and shaking his hand in a firm grip.

Then, the next thing Galo knew, he was waking up at home.

He laid in bed for a good few minutes, watching the popcorn ceiling swirl and trying to feel like he was actually back in his own body over all the noise. Even without going anywhere, he had a strange sense of vertigo, like everything was the wrong way round, or like it was all moving and shifting around him.

Within  _ maybe _ half an hour of waking up, Aina was pounding at the door to his apartment, and he was still kind of absent when he opened the door and watched how her face fall when she saw him. And the wings on his back. Oh, right. He had those now. Of course he did! He hadn’t even looked! (Made enough sense, he’d had a weird numb feeling on his back.)

The funny part was that, now he could see that she had them too. Oddly, that wasn’t really much of a surprise to him. They were almost cute! He said as much without hesitation, and she scowled at him, practically marching into his apartment.

“You have  _ no  _ idea what you’ve done Galo! I mean it!”

She paced around his living room, then his kitchen, for several minutes, yelling and anxiously twisting her ponytail in one hand. It wasn’t so much that her words went in one ear and out the other, as it was that most of them never hit him in the first place, even if the neighbours could probably hear her. After a few more loops around the kitchen table, she seemed to notice exactly how blank Galo's stare was, and promptly sat him down at the table with one hand on his shoulder.

Huh, maybe that explained why she was always stronger than she looked. Galo had no idea if Reapers were actually stronger than people, but it was a solid guess at least.

“Alright,” she sighed, running one hand across her forehead. “Alright. I’m gonna get us some takeout, because Game week hangover is a bitch, and then we’re going to have a chat.”

She marched right back out of his apartment again, even grabbing his extra set of keys off of the kitchen counter.

While she was gone, he just kind of sat there, trying to parse through the weird tides of nausea and how his ears didn’t seem to want to work quite right. It reminded him of being a kid, almost. He’d had the worst sensory issues as a kid, and they’d left him spacey in the same way sometimes. So, he counted the lines in the fake wood grain on the table, and waited.

At least, by the time the door opened again, Galo felt remotely like a person again. That was an improvement!

Aina was quick to plop down a bag of takeout on the table, and Galo quietly slid the order of sweet and sour chicken towards himself while she poured out their drinks into proper glasses. Two cans of root beer, like always.

Thankfully, between Aina calming down a bit and Galo regaining some normal human functions, they actually managed to have a conversation, or close enough to one. She knew him, and this time she knew well enough when things had to be explained slowly and clearly to sink in for him, and when it took him a moment of pause to parse any questions thrown his way.

When she asked him why he’d done this, why he’d made this choice, he’d managed to shrug and say it was because of Kray Foresight, the guy who’d literally saved his life, who had even helped fund him through firefighter training. Galo wasn’t a very good liar, but it wasn’t like that was entirely a lie.

Finding out Kray was involved in all of this had just pushed him further away from going right back to the way things were. Why  _ wouldn’t  _ he want to get involved if what was essentially his personal hero was there! (He didn’t say anything else about it, and tried not to look at Aina when she raised her eyebrows as if expecting more. He didn’t want to have to explain a weird gut feeling, because he knew that’d sound pretty stupid.)

Then she sighed and called him an idiot, like usual, and Galo wheezed a laugh around a mouthful of chicken, and then Aina was back to scolding him for his manners and everything was that much more like how it usually was.

Before she left, the two of them cracked open fortune cookies, like they always did. Galo was honestly just a fan of the cookies themselves, and the ones from the local takeout joint were  _ great _ , in his opinion. Aina’s said something about embracing new opportunities, which had her rolling her eyes and huffing as she shoved the cookie into her mouth. Galo’s said—

Oh, joy. All the letters were floating around, doing a little colourful dance.  _ This _ hadn’t happened so bad since he was a kid either. This Game hangover stuff or whatever kinda really sucked, in Galo’s opinion.

He hesitantly offered it up to Aina, and she shrugged.

“It’s blank, you must’ve just got a dud.”

“Really?” Galo took it back sheepishly, still not able to make out if it actually said anything or not. (Somewhere, in the back of his head, he thought  _ uh oh!  _ in a distinctly cartoony tone.) “Man, and I thought I’d forgotten how to read!”

Aina did something between a laugh and a sigh as she got up from the table, flicking him in the forehead along the way. “Only you, Galo. Only you.”

She hugged him with one arm before he left, past scolding him and into telling him to get a good sleep and drink lots of water. He did a little salute, and then she was gone again.

Really, Galo didn’t quite get why she’d been on such a tangent about how much he was going to regret this. (Maybe because he hadn’t heard half of it.) He only really had one problem with all this, aside from the weird vertigo feeling and how much he didn’t like making his friends that worried, and it was one he had been trying very, very hard not to think about until now. Thinking about the problem always made it worse, for him. But now he was home, alone, and couldn’t avoid the one thing that’d been plaguing him all week, that was plaguing him worse now that he could pay attention to it.

Ever since he’d died, everything had been so  _ loud _ .

Granted, Galo was loud. He’d always been loud. And in turn, everything else was loud to Galo. He had a lot of quirks like that, always had and figured he always would.

When he was younger, he’d had absolutely horrible sensory issues; most notably, the kind where noise made him feel like he was being put through a blender. He’d been picky with foods too, picky about everything, could yell all day without noticing and yet could also start crying the second anyone else raised their voice. His parents tried their best with him, and they’d been in and out of the doctors, trying to find something to chalk it up to, if that would help.

One of them, namely, was synesthesia. These days practically everyone he knew knew that he had it; it wasn’t like some big secret. If anything, he thought it was a bit of a fun fact about himself, great for things like small talk and party favours.

It’d been easy enough as a little kid when the doctor asked questions, to figure that yeah, sure, sometimes noises had a sort of colour to them, and sometimes other things like words did too, and sometimes things were just kind of all over the place for Galo. He really had had a lot of weird issues as a kid, and that’d been yet another explanation for it, another piece in the puzzle of whatever was going on in his head.

And that was still the explanation he went with! It helped explain some of his eccentricities a whole lot, along with the dyslexia, and the attention disorder, and whatever else was relevant at the time.

Even if, of course, he’d figured out a good while ago that that wasn’t exactly…it.

It’d first been bad after his parents died. Maybe the worst, then. (He didn’t talk about it much, not just because he didn’t like talking about it, but because he could barely remember half of it anymore.)

Foster care had often been loud, and he tended to be in and out of houses. No matter how polite he was, or how much he did his best in school, Galo was  _ loud _ ; he was bright and boisterous and often branded a troublemaker as a first impression. It didn’t help that he had issues either, that he had trouble reading, that he said and did things without thinking or understanding why he shouldn’t, that he’d spent a few years having the kind of night terrors that made him screech in his sleep.

But the one thing he’d never mentioned, that no one had ever known about since his parents had died, was the fact that Galo  _ heard _ things. Not like hallucinations, never the way those had been described. It was more of a constant, like the way he’d always been able to hear the drone of electricity through the walls in a house. So constant that, for the longest time, he hadn’t actually noticed it. Like elevator music, always kind of idling just quiet enough to go ignored if it wasn’t pointed out. Even if he knew some of the surges of sound he heard weren’t normal, that other people didn’t hear the same sudden sounds, the same swell and dwindle, it hadn’t really hit him until high school.

He never remembered the exact day, or what the weather was like, or what he was wearing, but that was besides the point. He must’ve been around fifteen or so, lanky and awkward and just into high school, and he’d bumped straight into someone he’d barely seen in the hall. Nothing out of the ordinary. Whoever it was hadn’t noticed, he’d never so much as seen their face, but. But.

In that one brief moment, he’d been hit by a veritable wall of sound, like taking a brick straight to the forehead. It’d made him stumble back, almost like taking an actual real hit, and he’d spent long enough standing dazed against a wall that he’d been late for class.

What had been so memorable hadn’t just been the noise; Galo had near-constantly felt like he was getting hit upside the head with sounds growing up. There had been something louder about it, more clear and distinct, that had hit him harder than anything ever had before. And, of course, there was the one thing that’d made it so memorable. It had been music.  _ Real _ music. Like a song.

After that he’d had to spend the rest of the afternoon in the nurse’s office, claiming he was stomach sick (because, really, he had looked pale and shaky at the time, the way people got before fainting) while the song kept echoing around his head, going straight through him like a hot knife in butter, even feeling like it had rattled through his bones.

Even years later, to this day, he remembered it, down to every detail. Thinking about it for too long left him feeling like every cell in his body was moving too fast, but in an exciting way. Like the dizziness you got from too many cartwheels, or a rollercoaster, or even just spinning around in a circle a few too many times.

Before that, most of the sound he’d heard had been like when a radio was tuned just slightly off; all static noise, or muffled in the way hearing something from underwater was. After that, he’d started to hear real sounds more often, something actually coherent, even if only in little fragments half of the time. He’d started noticing the constant drone of noise more too, feeling how it ebbed and flowed throughout without ever stopping for days, weeks, months, like a tide that pulled him and everyone else around him along.

It was funny, Galo thought. He managed to plop himself back in bed, far more soothed by laying down than sitting up (or god forbid, standing), and thought about that music again, not for the first time this week but for the first time without distraction. It was funny, because now, with whatever was going on with him being dead and also a Reaper, he felt like everything was moving too fast in just the same way. (Except, this was worse. He’d never actually gotten this sick off of sounds, no matter how much they made him feel like he was buzzing in imaginary colours.)

That was the other funny thing, too. The other weird thing, the one that had had him making that possibly really stupid split second Reaper decision, it was kind of like the same thing?

On their last day, he and Thyma had spent a decent deal of time goofing around, just prepping for tackling the final mission or whatever. And at one point, Thyma had gone to run into a cafe, wanting to grab a coffee or something before they moved on, and Galo had opted to stay outside. With the weather warming up, the city was vibrant, so very  _ alive _ , even if it’d also been droning too-loud elevator music in his ears since he’d died. (He’d done his best to cover up the fact that he was kinda responding to just about everything on autopilot, because it was all so  _ loud _ .)

While he was out there, in what had felt like a weird coincidental moment, he’d caught the eye of someone sitting at an outdoor table. It was even weirder when the stupid Promepolis too-loud background music dropped away, as if fading between tracks just in time for something smooth and warming to crash right into his ears.

Then, suddenly, that person’s eyes widened with something Galo could unspeakably identify as between surprise and annoyance, and then Thyma’s hands were on his arm, pulling at it, and that person was turning away with a weird flash-fire flicker around the edges as the music started to shift. But Galo was turning away too, right at the same time, both wholly unable and absolutely forced to look away because Thyma was calling his name, and the second he moved city static came right back to life in his ears, only feeling all the more harsh for it.

“Jeez Galo! Are you out here chasing butterflies?” Thyma had laughed, offering him up some kind of pastry.

It’d taken him a moment, but he’d laughed too, sheepishly smiling and looking away again, and not seeing anything weird at all in the outdoor cafe tables.

An hour or so later, when that gut feeling had been nagging him again about what he’d do when they won, feeling like something was kinda off, he realized that no one should’ve been able to see him out there. He was dead. He was dead and invisible and no one could see anyone playing the Game unless they were in the right shops.

(Not human, a voice, or a feeling, had supplied. That one wasn’t alive.)

It had reminded him of the first time he’d properly heard something, somehow. How the sound had been so clear, and so, not exactly loud, but intense. Like the way the sound of a sharp bell could cut clean through a room. Either way, it’d cemented that something about this whole thing was…off. (The city, the city was off, the whole thing slanted and just a little bit wrong. It’d been a little bit wrong for a long time. Just off-kilter, and still slipping. Somehow, being dead, that amplified it, made it infinitely easier to notice.

Something was  _ wrong _ .)

He knew, too, that somehow he would never get to the bottom of any of this if he was alive. Because yes, Galo was nosy, and he had an irresistible urge to right wrongs. (Something would go horrible, if he was alive again. He wouldn’t admit it, but he was sure of that now.) After all, Galo loved to help people! And couldn’t, at all, keep to himself if he thought something might need helping.

Still laying in bed, some immeasurable amount of time later, Galo’s phone dinged. He groaned when he had to reach for it, now feeling a little too aware of every inch of himself, accompanied by a weird simultaneous hyper-energy and exhaustion.

Ah, a text from Aina, and then one from Remi. He had to work tomorrow. At the fire station. At his firefighting job.

Right.

He’d been dead for a week. He was still kind of dead, but not dead enough to avoid work, because he’d just been that kind of dead for a week. He couldn’t really just say he was sore from the gym or something, because he was a firefighter, and he worked out like every day of his life. And he’d probably just spent all his vacation time being dead.

And he’d basically just signed himself up for another job too, with no idea what it entailed or what the schedule was like.

Shit.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> totally totally forgot with the last one but. i drew smth for this au at one point and its over [here](https://twitter.com/datareplica/status/1222022600638881793?s=20) !


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